In the fourth episode of Pharma Decrypted, host Sabine Louët, founder of SciencePOD, was joined by Cristina Finazzi, a customer experience director at Novartis with two decades of experience in medical congress strategy.
Fresh from a busy congress season that included four major events in two weeks, Finazzi made a direct case for why in-person congresses remain irreplaceable – and why the industry’s enthusiasm for AI and digital channels risks obscuring what actually changes clinical practice.
This blog encapsulates the key takeaways from the conversation.
1. Trust is the currency that congresses trade in
Finazzi opened with a distinction that framed the entire conversation. Digital channels are easy to measure. You get click-through rates, open rates, and KPIs in real time. Congresses are far harder to quantify, and nobody in twenty years of trying has produced a definitive answer on congress ROI.
But what congresses deliver is something digital cannot: trust. Trust isn’t something you can download, delegate to AI, or build through a screen. It’s nurtured through personal relationships, human contact, and making healthcare professionals feel seen and heard. Finazzi argued that this quality of engagement is what makes congresses fundamentally different from every other channel in the omnichannel toolkit.
The numbers aren’t trivial. Across major congresses Finazzi works on, the collective audience reaches ~150,000 delegates. That isn’t a social media impression count. These are real people, present on site, with the mental space and curiosity to engage.
2. Congresses are pull. Everything else is push.
One of Finazzi’s most striking observations drew on Professor Berger’s REDUCE framework, which identifies the key barriers to behaviour change. The first and most relevant barrier for pharma is reactance: the more you push, the more people resist.
That’s just human nature, not a healthcare-specific problem. Every channel in the omnichannel toolkit is fundamentally a push channel. An email, a banner, a sales rep visit: each of these interrupt the HCP’s day and demand attention.
At a congress environment that dynamic is reversed. HCPs choose to attend. They voluntarily step into symposia, walk onto exhibition floors, and approach booths. They arrive with the mental space to learn, freed from patient visits and hospital schedules that compete for their attention day-in-day-out the rest of the year.
That reversal matters because behaviour change at congresses is not driven top-down by the industry. It happens because peers are discussing change among each other. When a healthcare professional hears a respected key opinion leader or a fellow practitioner describe how they have already adopted a new approach, the perceived distance of the change shrinks. The congress provides something digital channels cannot: social proof delivered by the whole community, not by a single company.
3. The AI hangover is setting in
Finazzi didn’t dismiss AI outright, but was candid about the industry’s trajectory. She suggested much of the enthusiasm for AI in pharma is driven by internal benefits: Cost savings… faster production… content scaling… … those are useful outcomes for the business – but they aren’t outcomes that healthcare professionals care about.
The risk? Producing more content with less investment leads to more noise. Not better engagement. Finazzi pointed to broader evidence that AI-driven content production has spiked across industries. From books on Amazon – to music on Spotify – to legal filings produced without lawyers. Each case resulting in decision fatigue and system overload, not improved quality.
In healthcare specifically – AI is effective at producing average content. But in a landscape already saturated with noise, average simply doesn’t cut through. It doesn’t help the company achieve its objectives, and it doesn’t serve the healthcare professional who is already time-pressed.
Finazzi described what she called the “AI hangover”: the period after the initial excitement where organisations begin to ask the harder questions: Can we produce a full campaign with AI? Yes. Should we use AI-generated avatars to represent patients? Perhaps not, when patients already say they aren’t represented realistically. The industry, she observed, is beginning to put ethics at the front of the conversation rather than treating it as an afterthought.
4. Design the congress as a ripple, not a line
On the question of how digital and in-person channels should work together, Finazzi was a strong advocate for pre- and post-congress engagement. A major congress happens once a year. The content and the conversation need to extend across the other twelve months.
Her challenge to conventional thinking was about how that engagement is designed. The typical omnichannel plan runs as a linear timeline from January to December, with channels plotted sequentially and the congress marked as one event among many. Finazzi proposed a different model: the congress as the centre of a ripple, with all surrounding content radiating outward from it.
Before the event, digital channels build excitement and help clinicians plan their agenda. Research shows that delegates begin planning their congress schedules roughly two weeks before the event, making that window critical for securing engagement. After the event, the omnichannel toolkit reinforces message recall and uses insights gathered during the congress to personalise follow-up communication.
Crucially, Finazzi saw the congress as a source of insight, not just a moment of delivery. Understanding what individual HCPs are interested in, whether that is quality-of-life data, real-world evidence, or mechanism-of-action detail, allows the post-congress communication to be genuinely relevant rather than generic.
5. Data alone doesn’t change prescribing behaviour
The conversation closed on a point that echoed themes from earlier episodes: the limits of a data-only approach.
HCPs attend congresses not merely to access data, which is available anytime within seconds of release on a phone, but to discuss data with their peers. It’s the interpretation, the challenge, the open dialogue that informs clinical decision-making. A symposium with speakers on stage and time for questions still leans towards top-down delivery. The exhibition floor and booth spaces create room for the peer-to-peer conversations that actually shift thinking.
Finazzi argued that the industry has historically underestimated this. For years, the assumption was that clinicians care only about clinical data. They do, but data alone doesn’t change behaviour. There’s an emotional and contextual dimension to clinical decision-making that cannot be addressed by presenting trial results in isolation.
Unbranded storytelling, disease-area context, and the human experience of the patient all play a critical role in creating the conditions for a prescribing decision.
6. The booth still has a job to do
When asked directly why companies still need a booth at a medical congress, Finazzi’s answer was practical. In Europe, regulatory restrictions limit where branded content can be shared. The booth is one of the few spaces where a company can actively present its commercial messaging.
But beyond compliance, the booth serves a more fundamental purpose: it is a real space. It is somewhere HCPs can sit down, have a conversation, access coffee, and engage with peers and with the company on their own terms. In an environment shared with competitors, the physical presence of the booth also communicates something about the company’s commitment to the therapeutic area.
Finazzi was clear that a booth isn’t always necessary. The decision depends on the brand’s life cycle, the pipeline, and the strategic objective. The question that should come first is always “why”, not “how big.”
The Key Takeaways
- Trust is built in person. Congresses deliver something digital channels cannot: the personal relationships and human contact that build trust with healthcare professionals.
- Pull beats push for behaviour change. Congresses are the only channel where clinicians come to the industry voluntarily, with the mental space to engage and learn.
- More content does not mean better content. The AI-driven increase in content production creates noise, not impact. Average content will not cut through in a saturated landscape.
- Design the congress as the centre, not a waypoint. Replace the linear omnichannel timeline with a ripple model where the congress anchors the year’s communication strategy.
- Data starts the conversation. It doesn’t finish it. Clinicians attend congresses to discuss and challenge data with peers, not simply to access it, which they can do any time. The emotional and contextual dimensions of clinical decision-making matter.
- Ask “why” before “how.” Whether it’s a booth, a symposium, or a digital campaign, the strategic objective should drive the tactic, not the other way around.
The views expressed in this interview are the speaker’s own.
Interview conducted by Sabine Louët. Edited from the interview transcript for clarity and length.